I cannot believe you are ranking this above Buffy. I'm going to put it down to the medication you must be on.
I just didn't like Buffy. Sue me. Anyway, this also has Alyson Hannigan in it, and she was the best thing about Buffy.
This show is brilliant. I spent all of Memorial Day Weekend trying to convince my friends of its awesomeness. One or two may have half believed me.
I'm enjoying VM also. Have to take exception with you on Kristen Bell -- she's cute and beautiful both, or at least well on her way to the latter. You're also missing the point of Buffy: the genre play is too clever for words; the dialog is merely intermittently hilarious.
But that leads me to the problem I'm seeing with VM's genre: the lack of the exceptional. Without the genre hook of "the apocalyptic vs the mundane" that drove Buffy, VM has to rely more on dialog and characterization; to its credit it does so more consistently (so far) than Buffy did. I've only seen S1 so far; if S2 doesn't do something interesting (like make Veronica start paying back the karma of her ethically marginal actions throughout S1), it's not going to sustain my interest...
Jason Dohring is excceptional in Veronica Mars—given how bad the actor who plas Duncan is, I think the show would fall apart with Dohring.
You're just wrong about Buffy, ogged. Go give season 3 another look. Veronica Mars also benefits from following Buffy's model, except in the case of Charisma Carpenter, who essentailly reprises her role for V-Mars except with leather skin the second time around.
given how bad the actor who plas Duncan is, I think the show would fall apart with Dohring
Yeah, I think this is right.
5: You know, like how in that one episode about Jonathan they changed the intro credits to feature Jonathan, not Buffy?
Woo Veronica Mars! Welcome to the cult, Ogged.
Dohring is phenomenal in VM. Pretty much everyone agrees that Teddy Dunn is a lump.
I'm with the Smasher of Arms on Buffy, however. Seasons 2 and 3 are simply without peer. I hate being that guy who's all, "No, seriously, you must like this show, what's wrong with you?" but... c'mon, it's Buffy. I bet you don't like Firefly.
Anyway, this also has Alyson Hannigan in it, and she was the best thing about Buffy.
This, however, is the gospel truth.
Whedon's creations are a whole different level of smart than VM. (VM's fine, I guess.) Angel's last season sucked, but the episode with the PuppetMaster--was there ever anything so great? Except maybe the Buffy musical? Or the one where no one spoke?
Really, comparing VM to Buffy or even Angel is just silly.
Agree on Hannigan. Especially when she's playing both nerd-Willow and vampire-Willow. So awesome.
The only parts of Buffy I never saw were the Dark Willow episodes around the end of season 6. It must be said, when Buffy was bad, it was just dreadful.
was there ever anything so great? Except maybe the Buffy musical? Or the one where no one spoke?
See, this stuff doesn't amuse me at all. But let's not have a Buffy proselytizing thread. I've seen a lot of Buffy, really.
Oh, man, the puppet. One of the funniest hours of television ever. And vampire-Willow gives me a tingly feeling.
Comparing VM to Buffy isn't that crazy. Sassy, wise-cracking, blonde, self-reliant high-school heroine with wise-cracking sidekick and a secret? Check.
As much as I love me some Joss Whedon, I think VM might be as good a high school drama.
13: There's pretty much pre-Dawn and post-Dawn.
16: Agreed, with special dispensation for the musical.
I might have been a lot more open to Buffy were it not for the Buffy fans.
See, this stuff doesn't amuse me at all.
Umm, perhaps because you're dead inside?
16, 17: Agreed that Dawn was an awful character, but wasn't season 6 (and the end of season 5) some of the best TV ever?
The whole potential slayer thing, on the other hand -- I'm just getting around to watching season 7 now (on DVD, as I missed it the first time around) and I have to say, kinda sucks.
I used to tape Buffy and Angel for my cousin who lived in a small town with no WB affiliate. I never watched it, though.
Season 6 had so much potential, but they sacrificed beloved long-standing characterization on the altar of plot convenience.
Yes, the nerds were hilarious, and yes Evil Willow was a great villain, but I didn't love the execution. (Also, magic as drug addiction? Gag me.)
GILES: It's extraordinary.
WILLOW: It's horrible! That's me as a vampire? I'm so evil and... skanky. (aside to Buffy, worried) And I think I'm kinda gay.
BUFFY: (reassuringly) Willow, just remember, a vampire's personality has nothing to do with the person it was.
ANGEL: Well, actually... (gets a look from Buffy) That's a good point.
What is cool about this scene is mostly that they set up the gay Willow thing and leave it alone for another two years.
The best part of the episode, though, is Alyson Hannigan's gift for physical comedy, changing her walk in order to be the vampire (and then Willow pretending to be the vampire.)
18, 23: You know, you don't have to watch it with us.
Dohring is apparently a second generation scientologist, which wigs me out.
That episode also has one of my favorite exchanges of all time.
GILES: She truly was the best of all of us.
XANDER: Way better than me.
GILES: Much, much better.
OMG, a Buffy thread on Unfogged.
A few notes - Whedon is peerless. Then again, he's a third generation t.v. writer so if anyone should be able to do it, it's him. (And I think the eps everyone needs to see - and which have been mentioned are 1) Hush - this was in response to someone's criticism of Buffy as all about dialog. Joss's big fuck you was, okay, let's have an ep where NO ONE speaks. 2) The Body - Buffy's mom dies of natural events and suddenly the gang has to deal with real death. 3) Doppelgang - the good and evil Willows where anyone who was on the fence re Alyson Hanigan promptly fell over onto the side of pure love, sapphic and otherwise. 4) Once More with Feeling - or, we suspected that Anthony Michael Head really could sing and here's your proof.)
As this pertains to VM? Whedon gave an interview (it might have been on his blog, actually), where he endorsed VM as the successor to Buffy - the show and the heroine herself. Then when Rob Thomas - the showrunner AND former high school teacher and yearbook supervisor (which is why his dialog rings realistic) - added Alyson Hanigan AND Charisma Carpenter to the cast, the BtVS legions squee'd all over the VM boards. (Which I don't read but I have a friend who is obsessed with the show and who frequents the VM boards on TV w/o Pity.)
Not to mention the fact that Joss himself cameo'd on VM.
Season 2's Surprise/Innocence and Becoming 1/2 are also up there.
Anyhow, I'm eager to hear what Ogged things of the end of VM Season 2, and how it compares to Season 1. Hurry up and watch the rest so we can talk about it.
4) Once More with Feeling - or, we suspected that Anthony Michael Head really could sing and here's your proof.)
You're forgetting his stint at the Espresso Pump singing "Behind Blue Eyes". That totally redeemed "Where the Wild Things Are".
I'm feeling guilty re: ogged's #14. On a slightly larger topic, thinking of Buffy, The Wire, Deadwood, etc., I realize that TV now offers much better fare than the movies. Does anyone even think it's close anymore?
I'm in the middle of watching Buffy (just finishing season 3) and, you know, I like it and all. I like it really quite a lot -- I'll probably keep renting the DVD's until there isn't any more unless it gets really really lame in later seasons. But it isn't, like, life-changing or anything.
Go ahead, have your fucking Buffy thread.
TV totally kicks the movies's ass, but then there's Jonathan Rosenbaum's point that we don't get to see a lot of the movies, domestic, but mostly foreign, that are really good.
Generally speaking, I think there is a TV mini-renissance in effect now. Although, HBO ending deadwood makes me homocidal.
makes me homocidal.
Do I have the show for you!
TV has the advantage because writers have finally discovered all that can be done with TV. The best BtVS episodes aren't the stand-alone episodes -- they're the ones that fill in another little bit of the season-long arc, or sometimes, a seven-season-long arc. So they're funny, and clever, as one-hour comedies, but they build up to 22-hour, or 122-hour, long dramas, and that's what's really terrific. You can't do that with movies.
I would pay about a bajillion dollars for a show focusing on Al Swearengen vs. HBO management. Well, Al Swearengen vs. anything, for that matter. I have a serious mancrush on him.
32: Oh man... only good part of that crap-ass episode.
34: You don't understand! Buffy DID change my life! No one gets me. I'm going to go write in my LiveJournal.
To SCMT - that was the source of my epiphany a few years ago. I was focusing on screenplays until I realized all the writers I really wanted to emulate (not talking fiction) were Joss Whedon, Aaron Sorkin, Amy Sherman-Palladino, etc. Film's all about things exploding - it's about the stars and the directors. T.V.'s all about the writing and like you say, the writing's just gotten better and better.
The ability to buy an entire season of a show rocks. Movies are too long these days.
Let's have a fucking thread where we all fucking talk like Al Swearengen, you fucking cocksuckers!
Can the TV renaissance also be partly attributed to the quivering corpse of the fucking sitcom? The Simpsons outlived Friends and Seinfeld and those other stupid 1/2-hour sitcoms and everyone drew the appropriate lessons from that fact?
33 is wrong, wrong, wrong. The best movies far exceed the best TV shows. The most popular movies also beat out the most popular TV shows in quality. Recently, there have emerged a few TV shows that approach in quality the standards of good movies, and that has been a notable break-through.
I only kind of liked Buffy, and only the first several seasons.
What lesson? That it's easier when your protagonists are cartoons?
Re sit-coms, I'm LOVING It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
I think #38 and #41 explain my sense best. TV can build characters over several episodes. I didn't really come around on Avon Barksdale as my own personal growth management guru until Season 3. As that has happened, movies have become most spectacle--they focus on their comparative advantage of huge budgets and explode things. I think that's not unrelated to the fact that the only movies I now expect to be good are the ones based on comic books. Or Will Farrell movies, which are basically the same thing.
Perhaps, but I think a larger component is the greater willingness of TV executives to sanction multi-episode story arcs. That's what makes e.g. VM and Battlestar Galactica so good.
Do your televisions feed you people crack? When did unfogged get incorporated into crazy town? No. Name the TV series that even approaches something like a Robert Altman film. HBO has been doing good things lately, yes, but no, I put the kabosh on this.
Yeah, Season 3 is the last season, although they are doing a mini series to tie up the storyline. Head cocksucker David Milch is starting some new show and HBO couldn't afford to do both.
Textualist, my friend, The Wire is better than just about any movie I can think of. Better dialogue, richer world, more sophisticated telling.
(to 49) Yeah but that's why - they think - VM struggled last year to capitalize on all the buzz from the first season. The fact that it was a serial made it very difficult for first time or casual viewers just to drop in and have any idea what was going on. On the contrary, networks are anti-serial. They love the episodic shows like Medium or the Closer which can just be dropped into whenever. To that end, VM is trying 3 seven-episode arcs this year to make it more user-friendly to the casual viewer. As a rabid Buffy fan, I would think it would be easier to drop into a random ep and enjoy it that it would have been to drop into VM last season.
you can't compare the spectacle movies to The Wire; you would have to compare them with the shows that get the highest ratings. And there are tons and tons of movies that are neither spectacles nor Will Ferrell vehicles (not that Ferrell isn't totally awesome). There's a bright world out there, SCMT, and it's just waiting for you!
52: I wouldn't go quite that far. But I enjoyed it a hell of a lot more, for a lot longer, than any movie I've seen in the last three years. (Maybe two--my memory sucks.)
Robert Altman? I rejoice every day when my t.v. DOESN'T show me something like The Company. Perhaps the worse ballet movie ever. (Which is saying a lot.)
I don't know how to argue this any further, I mean, I like The Wire. But netflix has got some really good deals these days, and there are probably some good movies from the past few years you haven't seen.
Molly and I love Veronica Mars. I especially like the way the relationship between Veronica and her dad has played out. (We've only seen season 1 so far.) At one point I while watching thought, "I want to save my daughter from a big huge fire when she's trapped in a refrigerator," which is a damn weird thing to think, and I'm not really proud of it.
It's funny how TV used to be more constrained by time and the need to appeal to a broad audience than film and now the exact reverse is true. No film maker can write a plot that takes 22 hours to play out and will only appeal to feminists.
I have to disagree about the dialogue on Buffy. I love lovelove how over the top it is. It is a big reason I became obsessed with the show.
Well, yeah. I'm just talking about the quality of the shows, not their successfulness as such.
Incidentally, automated downloading of television shows using bittorrent and RSS may be the sweetest thing ever. It's even better than Tivo, I think.
Is Deadwood good? I couldn't finish the pilot show...
I really know nothing about ballet, and I've never seen The Company. Fine everyone. Enjoy the shadows in the cave.
The lesson was more that the only way a sitcom can remain fresh is to completely break apart the conventional setup every so often, or, in the case of The Simpsons, every five minutes or so. Some late episodes of The Simpsons make regular sitcoms look as plodding as epistolary novels. It sounds like Buffy was able to take some of these risks, but your average sitcom relies too much on familiarity ("here's where they go to that coffee shop they always go to!") and identification ("this time Jenna is struggling with jealousy!") to play around to much with their rules.
But then, I hate sitcoms, except for The Simpsons, and the TV I'm interested in these days are the HBO dramas, except The Sopranos, which seems still to be about people.
Deadwood is glorious, but I have met others who think otherwise, so it probably falls under the auspices of de gustibus.
I've only seen one episode of Deadwood and I found it hard to get over Ian McShane, who, in the UK, is mostly known for middle-of-the-road Sunday-evening type TV. Gentle sitcom stuff with roguish antique dealers, aimed at the middle-aged.
Although his turn as the bisexual gangster in Sexy Beast was pretty good.
Also, good TV can do something that movies can't. The longer time span lets long story arcs and character development happen that movies simply can't do. Of course, most TV doesn't bother. But it can.
I've never seen any film that does the sort of things that Cracker did over the first couple of series, or Homicide or the Sopranos did, at their best.
moira, how committed to being gay are you? I was just going to write, "Who's Robert Altman? Are you talking about the brother of The Vastly Overrated Robert Altman?" He made his name in the 70's and has been hit-or-mostly-miss since.
Does anyone have encouraging words for me re: Angel? I'm trying to get into it -- I'm almost done with season 1, via Netflix -- and it's totally dull. The only episode I like so far is the one where Sarah Michelle Gellar guests. Does it get any better, or should I just quit?
Is Deadwood good? I couldn't finish the pilot show...
Don't be a cocksucker. If you have a taste for libertarian politics (which I kind of think you don't), you'll like it.
Reading the thread now, I see I'm partially 0wned by SCMT in 33, and then everyone after that.
66: It gets better, but it's never as good as good Buffy. (Some of the individual episodes are really good, though.)
66: Yeah, it definitely gets better, but it starts to go way downhill when Dawn Connor shows up. The end was terrible, but there were some great single episodes along the way.
Boreanaz can be surprisingly funny.
18: J-Mo is banned from the Scooby Squad!
I also made it through about an episode and a half of Deadwood and quit, but I'm about to try again.
Boreanaz can be surprisingly funny.
Ok, mrh, you and I are coming from different aesthetic universes, because he's my number one example of a guy with negative charisma, who sucks the energy out of every scene he's in.
No, see, that's why it's surprisingly funny. In general, he has the charisma and sparkle of a large elm, but when it works, it works!
JM, it sounds like while you do not have symptoms to match my self-diagnosed case of Serial Drama Aversion Disorder (SDAD), you may have Serial Drama Aversion Syndrome (SDAS). Any trends to your symtoms? I wouldn't think a family history of arctic exposure could be associated, unless studies show unusually high incidences in Scandanavia, which is farther North than the Canadian Territories, at least on the mainland, but as the originator of this field of studies, who has not yet managed to organize a conference, or even appear on Montel, let me state unequivacally, that we are just beginning, there is an ocean of discovery ahead of us, and there are many more questions than answers.
questions like how to spell unequivocally.
that's why it's surprisingly funny
Fair enough, though you ought not have stuck around long enough to be surprised, says I.
I agree with 52 but don't think The Wire is a stand-in for tv in general. I stopped watching Buffy as soon as it looked like there was going to be some kind of troubled slayer-vampire romance, so that was probably pretty early. You may all mock me for my lack of taste while I'm offline.
What's interesting (and I'm going to let slide the whole lesbian/ballet thing go, mostly because I watched the Company to watch Neve Campell bend over REALLY SLOWLY) about this whole thread is that I've been reading and, well, studying what makes a great t.v. show. to pitch and hard to get picked up. So there's that.
If you can do, as Joss Whedon has done, and kept a show's entire mythology in your head for an anticipated 7 year run (as the industry's standard contract goes), that just makes the loyal viewership happier but it doesn't do much for drop-in viewers which is where the money comes from. This is, at the end of the day, about the commercial breaks, but it'll be fascinating to see how all this changes as more and more people rush to watch shows on DVD. I'm inclined to pick up Surface on DVD, a show I just couldn't get into when it originally aired (mostly because it was too similar to Threshold, which starred Carla and her Guginos, and I am powerless before those three).
Whoops, my first para got truncated - it should have read: The lesson number one is that a serial show is VERY hard to pitch and to get picked up because it's too hard for viewers to drop into on an episode by episode basis....
I'm going to let slide the whole lesbian/ballet thing go
I just want to make sure that you know I was making a joke attempt to make a pass at you above, as an indication of how much I agreed with some prior comment. If it'd been LB, I'd have asked how committed to Buck she was.
a guy with negative charisma, who sucks the energy out of every scene he's in.
Mmm. Remarkably dreary -- I'm shallow, and he's pretty, by my standards, and his appearance onscreen is still generally a signal for me to trun back to the book I'm reading.
oh, i thought it was a dig at a lesbian who watches ballet. I had to make sure you knew that I was all about the flat-chested amenorrheics. (And The Turning Point is actually a very good ballet movie, if for nothing else, to watch an in-his-prime Baryshnikov sail across the stage.)
Howcome no one talks about "The L Word," and the hottest cast on television? Is it because no one watches Showtime? Or because the show is actually pretty lame?
Not free-associating, but concluding I need to install a spell-checking plugin.
Watching Boreanaz in the first season of Buffy is pretty hilarious. If you have the DVD with commentary, even Whedon makes fun of him.
Moira (and IDP): good points about the network executives' preferring narrative structures that encourage the occasional viewer. Most of HBO TV I've been raving about I saw on DVD, and my friends who really follow TV have all just admitted their addictions and gotten TiVo already. Which means that nobody has to say, "I can't go out; we're watching Friends," which always signified "tool-t-tool-tool-tool" to me. So now, with cheap DVDs and TiVo, it's possible to follow TV story arcs without being a lame-ass with no social life.
God, I can't believe I'm judging other people's social lives on a blog.
The show sucks ass. I thought only the lesbos in SF hated it this much, until I moved to LA, where they REALLY hate it. (And if you go to one of the lipstick bars in LA - my sort of thing - you regularly see people who write and star on the show. I thought, surely people won't be so vocal with their unhappiness with the show while the writers/stars are within earshot. On the contrary,)
That said, Jane Lynch and Anne Ramsay are lovely people.
Boreanaz is consistently pretty terrible. Why cast him as an Irishman if he can't do the accent? And a tortured soul? Please. A tortured hulking lump of meat, more like.
86.--My female friends used to invite me over for special "The L. Word" parties. Oddly, none of them were lesbian, but the premise of the L. Word party would be that we would sit around and get titillated. I never went, so I don't know if the show is any good.
Maybe I should admit now that I don't have a television.
I need to switch to a computer with a bigger keyboard. Or do preview, or something. Lovely nuggets of observation are being randomly deleted by my laptop! Eh, as I was saying before I started dropping names of minor celebs, on the contrary, people in LA HATE the L Word. Hard though when there's exactly ONE show on a pay channel that's supposed to reflect an entire demographic. See, that's why I'm so happy that on the Hispanic front, I've got Freddie AND George Lopez.
Suggestion: keep the cast of "The L Word," rename it Charlie's Angels and let Joe Eszterhas write it. Monster hit!
Why cast him as an Irishman if he can't do the accent?
When he does the accent in flashbacks, I keep on expecting him to be attacked by vampires after his Lucky Charms.
Never seen "The L Word." Jennifer Beals is great in "Roger Dodger," though. And not bad in "Devil in a Blue Dress."
Part of the problem with Boreanaz is that he's so big. The aesthetic of BtVS was so pretty and little. All of the female characters were tiny, and so were most of the male leads -- Oz, for instance, fit right in (Xander didn't, but he played a doofus type, so that was okay). In the middle of all that, Boreanaz looked enormous, like a bull in a china shop. I wonder if the Angel character would be more likeable if he was skinnier and prettier?
Yeah. Sometimes I watch BtVS and wish that Angel was played by someone who looked exactly like Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
This is a good point. They pretty much had to put SMG on a milkcrate in her scenes with Boreanaz.
He also bulked up. By the end of the show, he could have eaten BtVS Season 1 Angel.
Does anyone have encouraging words for me re: Angel?
No.
Well, okay: sometimes there are, as has been said, some surprisingly funny bits. It would have been a lot better if they played the whole thing for laughs. But they didn't, and it is very silly as a result (and not "ha-ha" silly.) The "Senior Partners"? Yeesh.
Buffy was pretty good at first, but as I never tire of saying, it was never the same after they blew up the high school. That was so perfectly 1999. To go from that to a final season featuring a villian (an unseen villian!) whose special power boils down to bumming people out--well, it was quite a tumble.
Boreanaz isn't the only one in the cast who is huge. Marc Blucas, who played Riley, is a big guy. (And like Boreanaz, not as right for Buffy as Spike is.) They even made a joke about his size at the end of Superstar.
Although now I see from the IMDB that Blucas is only 6'2", which is not that much taller than I am. I guess he looks big because he is so fucking cut.
My theory of Riley is that we were supposed to hate him. Of course he's boring, that's why he's so wrong for Buffy, or really anyone that we care about. Having Buffy just once date a normal person then sets us up to accept her attraction to Spike. We now see just how much she needs to date vampiric freaks.
Segueing from Veronica Mars to Life on Mars: BBC America, Netflix and House. Who needs network TV...
Yeah, poor Riley. He never had a shot. His aw-shucks Iowa aesthetic just didn't work with Buffy's dark side. Even his descent into darkness was weird and stupid rather than interesting.
That was Life on Mars, a show. as opposed to life on Mars, a normal day in Los Angeles.
Agreed. But I liked how they wrapped up the Riley story, by bringing him back in season 6 with his awful, perfect wife (who was also enormous -- like, a full foot taller than Willow or Buffy). And then you see how wrong he was for B -- and how he belongs on an entirely different show populated by All American thoroughbreds with toothpastey smiles.
Can we have a proper Deadwood thread that's not all mixed up with these, er, other shows?
I'm going to watch Deadwood soon, slol, and I promise a thread after I've seen the first season.
Cool. Then I can tell you how wrong you are.
I feel like I should watch Deadwood, but am quite suspicious that I won't like it at all, and would only be watching it out of some sense of obligation.
Stop oppressing me.
PC whiner.
eb, listen, you should not watch Deadwood. If you did, you would be crossing some important taboo boundary and tasting forbidden fruit.
Did that help?
Actually, the character named "E.B." is possibly the least sympathetic in the show, so you might not like it for that reason.
I think at Acephalous I was told that E.B. was a Deadwood character. I probably should have started swearing in response. I generally don't like Westerns about the "old" west, even when they're going for authenticity or grittiness or trying to be true to history instead of sanitized or however they're being sold to current audiences.
I did like Dead Man quite a bit, though.
By the way, slol, did you see the historiographic joke at the end of that Wire thread?
The actor who plays E.B. is fucking brilliant.
The actor who plays E.B. is fucking brilliant.
Yeah, except, you know, he's Larry. And the toymaker from Blade Runner. Which is to say that, like the Ferris Bueller principal/newspaper editor, he slightly takes me out of the show each time I see him.
By the way, slol, did you see the historiographic joke at the end of that Wire thread?
No, I missed it. Was it good?
I generally don't like Westerns about the "old" west, even when they're going for authenticity or grittiness or trying to be true to history
I know what you mean; I think you should watch it, if you watch it, simply because it's a fine HBO show, much as The Wire is, and just as you shouldn't take The Wire to depict authentic modern Baltimore but rather a universe of its creators' imagination, you shouldn't take Deadwood to depict authentic 1870s Dakota but rather etc.
The show I think I was probably supposed to really love but never quite got the hang of was Carnivale. I dropped in too late to catch the beginning, and didn't feel like devoting myself to catching up. It's one I'll probably rent in DVD form at some point.
Angel was insufferably weak compared to the greatness of Buffy at its best.
I am totally on the "TV is beating the pants off of film" bandwagon. BSG is some stunningly good television.
It's one I'll probably rent in DVD
Don't bother, it was total rubbish. I felt mortally ripped off and wretched for having watched it.
120: But that's just the thing. I'm interested in the actual history of the west and not so much about today's stories about it. Baltimore, to take that example, interests me whether real or a creation of the show's writers. Go figure.
This computer - which isn't mine - is preventing me from linking to the old Wire thread. No right clicking allowed and no address bar in the comments box for cutting and pasting. It was a Wiebe/Hofstadter joke, so maybe not so funny.
Oh, never mind. I got it to work. This will disappoint everyone.
122: Aw, maaaaaan! It had an aesthetic I totally dug, and hey, The Little Man From Another Place, but I had no idea what was going on. Does that mean I actually came out ahead of most people who watched it? Crud.
Finally, Omar expresses the complaint of the unorganized against the consequences of organization. Stringer Bell's attempted reforms of the Barksdale operation represent the ambition of the new middle class to fulfill its destiny through bureaucratic means.
Heh. Indeed.
I had no idea what was going on.
See, neither did the show's writers. Which is, I believe, why it got cancelled. You're right, though, it looked really cool.
We are re-watching season one of Battlestar right now. The first time through, I didn't think much of the Zach/Kara sub plot. This time through it is working for me, I think because I have a better feel for the characters.
Really what we are seeing now is a renaisannce in television shows with utterly fantastic premises deeply imbedded in silly genres.
Also, has anyone seen my DVD remote? I've already looked under the deat cushions.
ok, which of the following is most true for y'all
1. One time, we rented a show, but couldn't watch it because we couldn't find the remote for the DVD/TV/VCR
2. We routinely decide not to watch TV because we can't find the remote we need to get the thing to work.
3. We have home entertainment appliances we haven't used in years because the remote is missing.
Check under the sweatshirt of the floor.
My workload seems to be incompatible with proper unfogged participation these days. But I couldn't let this stand (sorry, Jackmoron):
The lesson was more that the only way a sitcom can remain fresh is to completely break apart the conventional setup every so often, or, in the case of The Simpsons, every five minutes or so. Some late episodes of The Simpsons make regular sitcoms look as plodding as epistolary novels.
I think this is exactly incorrect. The implication that the second sentence is a good thing is especially wrong. The Simpsons is at its worst when it gives in to its cartoon impulses, reaching for the stupid non-sequitur (e.g. "Jebus") and betraying its characters.
That's not to say that it didn't benefit from a flair for the absurd, or the low set costs associated with not having sets. But "the setup" in this show's case was the cast of characters. A while ago, in his online chats, Post humorist Gene Weingarten led a collaborative effort to list the greatest sitcom characters of all time. He disqualified all Simpsons characters, saying that otherwise they would fill the entire list.
I may be over-evangelizing, but Matt Groening, George Meyer et al really put together an impressive collection of archetypes, organized around a sweet but cynical view of good intentions' total irrelevance in the face of human frailty. Nowadays the off-the-wall setups increasingly involve the characters acting in unnatural ways, which betrays the exact thing that made the show great. Somehow they manage to make Homer buying an RV seem more ridiculous and stupid than when Homer became an astronaut.
I'll admit that you're right, JM, that shows have to reinvent themselves or stagnate. But you have to replace what you tear down, and, unfortunately, the Simpsons writers ran out of ideas a long time ago.
And, while I'm spouting off theses about previously mentioned shows...
RESOLVED: Deadwood is a boring/stupid/relentlessly depressing show wrapped in astoundingly rich language.
131 prompted me to write a hook 'em tom woo! welcome back to the comments section, but 132 reveals him as a total Aggie! Sure, okay, the theatre stuff sucks, but Swearingen is awesome, cocksucker!
I have nothing further to add to 133. No wait, I do:
tom's a hooplehead that can scarce see when
the best show ever's in front of his face.
Yeah. I'm not sure I really believe 132. The acting is great, as is the throat-slitting. But the central plot with Hearst is pretty boring and slow-moving. The real appeal is the writing, I think. I say all this as someone who just started watching this season, though.
Homer has bought an RV more than once, and it was funnier one of the later times (I don't remember how many times there were). The first season, when they're trying hardest to stay in character and emulating most closely a real sitcom, is nearly unwatchable, except for a couple of episodes.
I will not defend lots of stuff in later seasons because lots of those shows suck. But they generally still know how to do well the first section before the commercials. Most of the episodes that are horrible are horrible because they're trying to be consistent with a story and need to wrap it up at the end, not because they get too random and out of character.
I realy liked Arrested Development, random as it could be.
136 gets it exactly right. The out-of-character stuff is largely because they're subordinating character to plot (and they're some damn lousy plots at that).
Arrested Development is an interesting show to compare. I'd argue that it was also driven by its characters' personalities. The randomness wasn't inherently funny, it just served as a culmination of the characters' quirks. For instance, the whole Little Britain thing was at best moderately amusing, because the only character-based angle to it boiled down to making fun of the mentally disabled.
Which, okay, is admittedly kind of funny. But only because it's a subset of "cruelty", which I'm beginning to think is the essence of all timeless comedy.
Right; I'd see AD as a show where the plot revolved around the characters rather than vice versa. I'd put Seinfeld in this category too.
I suspect stuff like that tends to break down when the run of the show gets really long, though.
Was Little Britain season 3? I haven't seen that yet (or don't remember it, if it was in an earlier season).
138: Right. Are we agreeing? These days the Simpsons writers abandon writing for their characters in favor of writing wacky plots, because it's harder to add to a classic character than it is to come up with a wacky new plot.
I think eb is saying that the stupid plots are poorly executed, and that's why the show sucks. That's probably right. But the stupid plots also destroy the potential for character-based humor, which is the reason the show was great. When they manage to pull of a plot but not the characters, they just end up with a less-funny Family Guy. See, for example, the recent Pie Man episode.
i agree that boreanz is usually pretty dull, but when he's playing 'angelus' - thats one of the best things of the entire buffy/angel series. he's so gleefuly vicious.
What I'm saying is they get trapped. They write a plot that requires a chase at the end and they get stuck with a chase that looks like any old not funny chase. They write a plot where Homer worries that he's a bad husband/father to Marge/Lisa/Bart/Maggie or all of them and they get stuck with having to put in a reconciliation at the end. Those plots aren't that wacky. And especially the Homer as bad family man plots are entirely about being trapped by having characters act in, rather than out, of character.
Guatamalan insanity peppers? That was wacky. Maybe few people liked that one as much as I did.
142: We seem to be agreeing. I definitely agree that the Pie Man episode was an example of a time when they actually did the plot well (episodes like that are almost without exception ripped off of movies these days) and it still wasn't funny.
I actually don't know what character-based humor is. I do know that having a massage-chair at high speed reproduce the ending of 2001 is really funny and one of the things that made the show great. Homer channeling Kubrick is probably not in character. A day care center with a scene resembling the ending of the Birds is funny and distinctive too. How it's built off of Maggie's character is not entirely clear.
Guatemalan insanity peppers was one of the greatest episodes they've done. It even had Johnny Cash!
What I'm saying is that whether or not the humor was originally character-driven a la AD or Seinfeld, the early seasons (with the exception of the first) resulted in a really great cast of well-defined characters, and the recent seasons have basically done nothing with them, instead turning to stupid plots that usually don't even work.
I think what I'm saying is bad Simpsons episodes are bad for various reasons that aren't easily broken down to "the key to earlier success was X and they don't do X anymore" explanations. Unless it boils down to: "the episodes were written and directed very well until they weren't written so well."
Yeah, you may have nailed it in 149, necessarily vague though it may be. The 2001 chair shot is a great example: they don't do those kinds of unusual shots very often anymore. The best seasons are full of weird perspectives and jokes that most of the audience won't get (what percentage of the Nielsen audience has seen Citizen Kane?). Everyone on that show was clearly trying really hard, all the time.
There's a tautological aspect to it, too. The show was defining itself then, so whatever it did became "classic Simpsons". It's much harder for them to add to that canon now (although of course I still think that it's objectively less funny — it's just that I might be wrong).
Before I head to bed, teo's also totally right in 148. The last memorable new character that I can remember being introduced is Gil the salesman. And he's pretty one-dimensional.
I once almost convinced someone with no interest in watching Citizen Kane to watch it just for the scenes recognizable from the Simpsons. There was a more recent episode where Bart and Lisa are chasing Homer and Marge around and the animation is transformed to something out of Catch Me if You Can. I thought it was great, and I haven't even seen Catch Me if You Can, but I was left wondering why they don't do that kind of stuff as much anymore. I don't remember what I thought of the episode as a whole.
On preview: Tom's completely right about Gil. How many times can a guy fail as a salesman before they try to do something else with the character?
re: 132
No, no, no, no.
Deadwood is depressing, but the consistant greatness of the show is the way in which glimmers of human decency manages to show through in otherwise abysmal circumstances.
Additionally, that it can do 153 without seeming maudlin.
Yeah, Gil sucks, but they had to do something to replace Phil Hartman.
I liked the Catch Me If You Can sequence, but when recent episodes like that work pretty well I'm always suspicious that the plots are torn wholesale from movies I haven't seen (because sometimes I have seen them and that's exactly what they do). That's not necessarily a bad thing to do, but if they're not going to come up with an original plot couldn't they at least use the characters they have instead of changing their personalities completely to conform to the plot? I mean, what's the point?
Of course I had to be driving and miss the Buffy thread.
Look, disliking Buffy is a mark of bad character, idiocy, or sexism. There's just no way around it. And it's not true that it gets worse after the high school episodes: it gets more complicated in terms of the generic play stuff, and therefore more uneven, but the reasons for that are really quite interesting and show how far the writers were pushing things. You aren't allowed to say "oh VM is much better" (which it may be, I don't know, haven't seen it yet) unless you at least recognize that one of the reasons that post-Buffy ass-kicking-women shows succeed because they can build on Buffy's foundations.
As to Angel: it's not as good as Buffy. But the post-Connor season in which the woman who later appears on Firefly plays the evil goddess figure who actually brings total goodness to the world at the cost of having to occasionally eat a person is really interesting. Basically it's an entire season of a show about vampires where the theme is "free will: yay or nay?" Which come on, give them some credit.
Sadly, I didn't watch most of the episodes with the Spike ghost, because Spike mocking Angel is always hilarious. I'll catch up on those at some point, I imagine.
The Simpsons outlived Friends and Seinfeld and those other stupid 1/2-hour sitcoms and everyone drew the appropriate lessons from that fact?
But the *quality* of the Simpsons did *not* outlive Friends (which is ok, since Friends never had no quality nowise). Like all true fans of the Simpsons, I haven't seen a new episode in about five years. Even though I understand that people claimed for them some kind of renaissance a while ago.
Some late episodes of The Simpsons make regular sitcoms look as plodding as epistolary novels.
But this what's wrong with them. It's not pulled off well. An episode in which for the first five minutes Abe gets up to some hijink which has absolutely nothing to do with what follows—it just sets up some key phrase that serves as the jumping-off point for the "plot" of the remainder—is not a good episode. Or consider the one where Homer becomes a missionary b/c he's pissed off a bunch of NPR personalities—it comes off as if the writers couldn't come up with a full show, even by Simpsons standards, in which many of the great shows are rather fragmentary, and so decided just to sinter together by hook or, at their option, by crook some scraps they had lying around.
They've also made the characters, especially Homer, into nothing more than vectors for non sequiturs. But *unfunny* non sequiturs, which is really the problem. Need to eat up some time or precipitate the plot of the entire episode? Why not have Homer do or say something incredibly stupid and arbitrary?
Most of the episodes that are horrible are horrible because they're trying to be consistent with a story and need to wrap it up at the end, not because they get too random and out of character.
But many horrible episodes are horrible for exactly the opposite reason! RESOLVED: The Simpsons peaked long, long ago, and recent seasons should not be released on DVD, so as to enable us more easily to put them from our minds.
Also, Gil is too transparently an in spe memorable character for him actually to be a memorable character. This goes beyond his one-dimensionality. The fatal element of trying too hard.
I see that tom has also expressed similar complaints (though I wouldn't go so far as to address mine to "Jackmoron").
Actually, the character named "E.B." is possibly the least sympathetic in the show
No, E.B. is just the most pathetic. The least sympathetic characters are the guy who shoots Hickock and the guy who murders prostitutes (played by the same actor, no less). The guy who comes in to compete with Wu and the Bella Union honcho are also less sympathetic than E.B..
it's not true that it gets worse after the high school episodes: it gets more complicated in terms of the generic play stuff, and therefore more uneven
Which is to say, not as good. I don't want ambitious tv, I want entertaining tv.
Saying that the show was never the same after the high school period doesn't mean there was never anything good about in the later years. It was just in many ways a different show, one that had outrun its premise and had to look around for another. The increasing crappiness of the show, despite its real virtues and occasional successes, says to me that it never really found one.
And there is no defense of "The First" as the villian of the final season. That just plain sucked ass.
158: I don't want ambitious tv, I want entertaining tv.
Cope. If you want something good, people gotta put forth effort and try new things. Trying new things implies occasional, perhaps even frequent, failure. Genius isn't about succeeding 100% of the time, it's about trying and failing and trying and failing and then producing something amazing. The alternative is Friends. Is that what you really want?
Which is to say, not as good. I don't want ambitious tv, I want entertaining tv.
See? I told you you were an elitist.
And it's not true that it gets worse after the high school episodes: it gets more complicated in terms of the generic play stuff, and therefore more uneven, but the reasons for that are really quite interesting and show how far the writers were pushing things.
Oh, come on.
For some reason we've been getting season six on Netflix recently so the wounds have been re-opened for me. I dare you to sit down and watch, really watch, one after the other, the latter half of season six -- all the sulking! the moping! the tense awkward bickering! the drugs nonsense! the pale pinched ratty faces of cast members who know they are doing an evil thing to something once beautiful -- Sarah Michelle Gellar's face throughout the season is the hideous face of a necrophile caught in the act! -- to watch it with anything close to actual pleasure. Or even just without scorn and a sinking feeling and a headache. I dare you, I double dare you.
Car crashes are interesting.
Genius isn't about succeeding 100% of the time, it's about trying and failing and trying and failing and then producing something amazing.
The canny genius will have the sense to keep her failures to herself, instead of broadcasting two whole wretched seasons of them.
In other words, what JL and Felix said.
162: Point the first; it's not always straightforward to know that you've lost it and it's not coming back. Often, you only know in retrospect, just like you only notice that you produced something great in hindsight. Point the second; they were being paid tremendous sums of money to broadcast those failures. The ideal of the starving artist is romantic, it's true, but so unsustainable. Linking food on tables and roofs over heads to heavy selection pressure towards only 'success' and against any sort of 'failure' will reproduce the 'creative' process that gave us Friends.
But the post-Connor season in which the woman who later appears on Firefly plays the evil goddess figure who actually brings total goodness to the world at the cost of having to occasionally eat a person is really interesting.
I thought she was on Firefly first and then got to be the evil goddess when it was cancelled but oh, now you mentioned Firefly and I love it love it love it and hurray for Mal & River! and everyone.
You can't take the sky from me! Bitches!
That's an awful fucking song and I want to tear it from my ears.
166: You are dead to me.
The last few seasons of Buffy and Angel did turn into a Firefly guest-star-a-thon, what with Nathan Fillion and Gina Torres all showing up.
The last seasons of Buffy weren't bad compared to, say, Dawson's Creek, but they were bad compared to seasons 2 - 4. Season six was a bit of a mess, but season 7 was a disastuh. The First was such a cool idea that was executed so, so badly. (On the other hand, they did bring Faith back, which, yay!)
(I want to point out, Cala, that I mentioned Firefly back in comment #10, but I'll let that go so I can hurrah along with you.)
156: And it's not true that it gets worse after the high school episodes: it gets more complicated in terms of the generic play stuff, and therefore more uneven, but the reasons for that are really quite interesting and show how far the writers were pushing things.
and
But the post-Connor season in which the woman who later appears on Firefly plays the evil goddess figure who actually brings total goodness to the world at the cost of having to occasionally eat a person is really interesting.
I'm going to assume you're doing meth to stay awake while driving. Or that you bear some sort of malice towards Whedon and his works.
157: It pains me to say it, but you're completely right.
You can't take the sky from me (twang twang twangatwang strum)).....
You are dead to me.
As an experiment: play the Firefly theme song, and then play the god-awful, condemned-as-an-atrocity-by-all-civilized-people theme to Star Trek: Enterprise. Play them back to back again. And again. Now skip from one to the other, faster and faster, more and more rapidly. You cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. Like communism and fascism, like Napoleon and Farmer Pilkington, they have become the same fucking thing.
You know why they can't take the sky from him, Cala? 'Cause he's got faith. Faith of the heart.
158: I think your overstating the importance of ambition in what I'll call, to make Ben happy, a genre form. But I'm as little interested in arguing abou that now as anyone else is in hearing from me about it. I will say that one of the things I admire about Law and Order (the original show, not any of the less well constructed spin-offs), despite its long decline in writing and acting quality over the past decade, is that the show grabbed hold of its formula and never wavered from it. It's like clockwork.
Anyway, I'd like to see anyone come up with a decent comeback to Felix's 161. No, Buffy didn't start to stink at all when whole episodes began revolving around characters like Riley, Dawn, or Faith. Those were genius.
You can't take the sky from me (twang twang twangatwang strum)).....
deedle deedle deedle dee
this is where a tune should be
is this done yet?
nearly there
deedle deedle deedle durr
157:
w-lfs-n is right. Can we blame family guy?
172 made me chuckle. But you're still wrong.
Riley was awful. And so was the last season of Angel, except for the puppet episode. I wanna slay the dragon.
C'mon! Serenity flying over a herd of galloping wild horses? How can your heart not leap!
There is no decent comeback to Felix's 161. "Buffy works at a fast food restaurant!" was the dramatic arc for a depressingly large number of episodes. That was lame.
But anything involving Faith is good, so step off.
I wish I'd written 170. Jealousy made me all childish and spiteful.
Nevertheless I stand by my childish spite. It's an awful song.
I didn't say it was a good song, but it's totally not the awful Enterprise song.
(twang twang twangatwang strum)
But anything involving Faith is good, so step off.
I used to wonder whether it was that Eliza Dushku was incapable of doing anything but attitudinizing in an acting role, or if the character of Faith was just written to allow for nothing else. The non-Buffy evidence suggests both were true.
Throughout this thread, I've had Homer's voice in my head saying, No, let me ask you a question. Why does a man whose T-shirt says "Genius at Work" spend all his time watching a children's cartoon?
I can't be the only one.
181: Was that from the Poochy episode? I know I'm in the minority, but that was a terrible episode.
I think so.
It was awkwardly self-conscious and defensive (see, e.g., 181), but it had some good lines.
Well, that's the thing. For a show that's supposed to be funny, it came off as egregiously humorless and thin-skinned.
I can't agree more with tom's and w-lfs-n's critiques of The Simpsons, and that missionary episode is the very episode I point to when I try to explain to benighted individuals why the show has sucked since the late 90s. Oh, and how it bugged me when "Jebus" got picked up as a catchphrase around the left blogs (Atrios, notably). It's not funny! It doesn't deserve catchphrase status!
To reiterate what other have said: absurd plots, characters acting out-of-character, and worst of all, not funny.
130: The Sweatshirt of the Floor is vast, and encompasses all things.
The 2001 chair shot
A bit OT but does it work to call a cartoon sequence a "shot"?
I'm a hardcore Whedon fan, but I have to agree that the Firefly theme song sucks. In general Joss's taste in music leans toward the maudlin, mainstream, and boring. I was amazed that the musical episode of Buffy worked.
180: Indeed. Have you seen "Bye Bye Love" starring, among others, Paul Reiser? AttiTUDE! And "Bring It On" was awesome.
But Faith is awesome and Dushku is hot.
Shit, did I really type "jackmoron"? Sorry, Jack. Unintentional!
I saw Dushku in a play in NYC and I'll say it: way hot. Even hotter in person, guys.
191: Yeah, but she sounds like she periodically coughs up and has to re-swallow her own voicebox. It's not quite as off-putting as it is for Jaime Pressly or, now, Lindsay Lohan, but it's still pretty bad.
Fine. I've been smacked down by the Television Taste Squad. Consider me duly chastened. I hate comedy.
I have no problem with one trick ponies if the trick is good enough. And the pony is hot.
That came out odd.
But Faith is awesome and Dushku is hot.
Ok, ok, she's hot--for a plate-scraper.
Bring It On is indeed awesome, though I'd say she doesn't contribute much to it. Not entirely her fault--she doesn't have one of the really fun roles.
Anyway, mrh, since you're reading this thread: if you don't mind me asking, where in Providence do you live? East Side, Elmwood, Armory District, etc.? As the search for a house goes on, I'm wondering how big a pain it would be to leave Summit for elsewhere in the city in terms of the morning commute north.
Dushku is indeed hot.
Also, re: 192, there's nothing wrong with that kind of voice.
196: I donno. Husky is one thing, croaking and squeaking under the weight of a thousand packs of cigarettes is another.
Dushku is indeed hot.
Comity! Get on board, tom.
JL: I live on the East Side, Summit in fact, so getting out of Providence is a piece of cake for me. Feel free to email (matt at unlikelywords).
I live on the East Side, Summit in fact
Damn. I hoped you were keepin' it real out in the Armory or other points west--Elmwood, Broadway--or south, like Washington Park, instead of up with the yuppies and Orthodox. There's only about a half dozen houses on the East Side we can afford, and most of those are down the hill toward North Main. We would rather not leave Summit, but there aren't many other options (very little is for sale in Oak Hill, and the other nearby areas of Pawtucket or Providence--Fairlawn, the North End--kind of stink.)
It especially cheeses me off to see beautiful houses out in Elmhurst, where I would mind living but would kill my commute, sellig for the same as some crapshack in Fairlawn, which isn't even an attractive neighborhood, though convienent for us.
(Sorry to highjack the thread, but it's hard to supress my current obsession.)
does it work to call a cartoon sequence a "shot"?
For the particular scenes in the Simpsons that the term is being used to describe, yeah. These are drawn in a deliberately cinematic manner, where the angles and perspective are part of the joke/effect, rather than just as a means for the characters say their lines. Like The Birds sequence at the daycare center, or the episode where Homer describes his (drunken) behavior at a party the night before, and the flashback is a 360-degree shot drawn in a very stylized pen-and-ink manner. Most of these sorts of scenes are homages to movies, so calling it a "shot" is valid.
I have a few friends who live in the Broadway and Armory areas. They seem to like it pretty well. You can definitely get more for your money. In many of the Armory neighborhoods I've been to, the farther "in" you get from the main street, the nicer the houses get, so there's some good options.
We prefer yuppy Orthodoxy, though. When we bought our current place, we looked at some beautiful places just over the Cranston line, but in the end we decided to stay in the '06.
So, apparently we're neighbors? Providence meet-up!
Yeah, I used to live in the Armory--Hudson St., right near the Market--and my apartment, one of three in the building, was bigger than a lot of houses. We had somewhere in the area of 1800 sq. ft. living space--and with 22 drafty windows, heating bills were not fun. But it basically sucked living over there, especially since I didn't have a car at the time. Loud, loud, loud. So loud. People screaming in the streets all day and night. Did I mention it was loud?
So, apparently we're neighbors? Providence meet-up!
We are indeed. I'm on Ro/cham/beau. I think a meet-up would have to involve you meeting someone cooler than me, however.
Like all true fans of Ben w-lfs-n, I did not read the last few paragraphs of 157, but I can say with certainty that the quality of the comment declined after I stopped reading.
I think "shot" may apply literally, too. Someone - I think David Silverman - on the commentaries describes setting up thirty feet of something or other and running the camera over it to capture the sequence where Homer describes his drunken memories of the party the night before.
Plenty of classic episodes have things happen in the first few minutes that aren't relevant to the rest of the episode. It's intentional, like having Psycho start out being about stolen cash. The commentaries for the first five seasons are full of moments where they say "we just put this in to take up time" or "the show was short so we made that joke longer." The difference now is simply that the filler isn't as good as it was.
I don't disagree that the show isn't as good now, but lots of things people say about why it's bad are empirically not true.
167: I'm not sure it's so much that the last seasons of BtVS and Angel were Firefly guest-star-a-thons so much as Firefly was Whedon's big chance to bring in actors that he adored from working with them previously. If you ever take the time to listen to any of his commentary tracks, it's obviously that Joss is absolutely besotted with basically everybody he works with. It's cute. And who wouldn't totally fall in love with Gina Torres?
And who wouldn't totally fall in love with Gina Torres?
Me. I find her irritating.
I don't disagree that the show isn't as good now, but lots of things people say about why it's bad are empirically not true.
I think the key thing is that the things that people point to now, though they may have been done before, were done well before. It's not just "they do this now", but "they do this now, and it's just not good".
182: Are you really in the minority in disliking the Poochy episode? For realz? I've always thought it kind of obvious that it was bad (though I did like the introduction of the one character who was living with the Simpsons but moved out to stay with four fine ladies).
And the line is from the Poochy episode; Comic Book Guy asked a question of the voice actors regarding a sequence in an Itchy & Scratchy episode in which Itchy plays Scratchy's rib cage like a xylophone and hits one rib twice in a row, though two distinct notes are heard.
I have absolutely no idea when the last time I saw that episode was, but it was more than at least three or four years ago. I am so pathetic.
No no no! It's the same sequence of ribs twice in a row, with two different melodies. NOW who's pathetic? Also: dungeon, wizard key, etc.
Anyway, I have to disagree about the Poochie episode. It isn't the best, but it's pretty funny. Faced with the towering awfulness of later shows, we have to take whatever episodic allies we can get.
I think the key thing is that the things that people point to now, though they may have been done before, were done well before. It's not just "they do this now", but "they do this now, and it's just not good".
Never has there been such a thread with more agreement phrased as disagreement: this is what I've been saying.